Explosion Effect - viewed
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Introduction

In this Photoshop tutorial we're going to create exploding clouds or whatever you want to call it. The strength of this tutorial is that the effects are easily adjustable and this Photoshop technique is also well suited to create animated explosion effects in ImageReady. Let's start.

1. Prepare the background

Open a new image. I created a small 400x300 image and
kept it small to be able to use it in this tutorial.
As long as you use this size you want to have many problems
with the advised brush size or gaussian blur setting
later on. But the tutorial shouldn't give you any majors
problems even if you choose a much larger size.

Press
the letter D on
your keyboard, which makes the foreground color
white and the background
color black.

Now grab the Paint Bucket tool from
the toolbar and fill the background with black.
Go to the layers palette and click on the Create
a New
Layer icon to
add a new layer.

2. Change the foreground color to red

Now
click on the foreground color and select an average looking
red.

In my case I selected the color in the upper right corner
(A) which has the value
FF0000 (B).

3. Select the proper brush

Select the Brush tool in
the tool bar.
Click on the area of the options bar that I've marked in red and select a 100px brush,
with a hardness of 0%, which is
the softest brush you can use.

The size of the brush depends a bit on the size of the image you started
with.

4. Paint the basic shape

We're going
to use 3 colors:

Red

Yellow

White

First we start with red and paint a random shape. Make
sure that it does look random, so don't paint a circle
or square. Don't paint just an outline, but paint inside
of the shape too. (although it's fun to experiment with
shapes that only show an outline, but for now we
stick to a filled shape).

After we're done with this we
select a yellow color, I selected #FFFC00.

This time paint inside the red, but not too close to
the border. Consider to one or two (or more) separate
yellow areas, as long as they are inside the red shape.
If the brush is too big, then just go back to the options
bar to select a smaller size or press [ a
few times on your keyboard. Press ] to
make the brush bigger. Again, try to draw a shape (or
shapes) that's quite random.

The last color that we select is white (#FFFFFF).
This time paint inside the yellow shapes, again not
too close
to
the
border and resize your brush if you have to.

Here's an example of what it might look like:

In the red shape we have two yellow shapes and inside them two
white shapes. Not all that random, but this will do for
now.

5. Blur the clouds and add a Hue & Saturation adjustment layer

Got to the menu and select Filter/Blur/Gaussian
Blur...
Select a radius of 40 pixels and
click OK.
Again, the same
story with the brush; the radius depends on the size of
the image. Use a smaller radius for a smaller image, a
larger radius for a larger one.

Now click on the Create an Adjustment
Layer icon in
the layers palette and select Hue/Saturation... and
click OK.
We now have a Hue & Saturation Adjustment Layer and we're going to change
it
to
a Clipping
Layer on top of our layer with the blurred shape by pressing Ctrl + G(Command
+
G
on
the Mac) or Ctrl + Alt + G (Command + Option + G on the Mac) if you use Photoshop CS2.

By turning it into a clipping layer we're making sure that the Hue & Saturation
adjustment
will only affect the layer underneath (that's
how
clipping
layers work).
What is the function of this Hue & Saturation layer? I'll explain later.
For
now leave the default settings of this adjustment layer the way they are.

6. Add a 'Clouds' layer

Go to the layers
palette and click on the Create
a New Layer icon to
add a new layer.

Like in step #1, we're going to change the fore- and
background colors again; press the letter D on
your keyboard, which makes the foreground color black
and the background color white.

Now we fill the layer with black (the color doesn't
really matter) using the Paint
Bucket tool in
the tool bar .

Now go to the menu and select Filter/Render/Clouds.

The result is a random result.
If you don't like the generated 'clouds' then just press Ctrl
+ F (Command
+ F on the Mac) until you see something you like. You can
repeat this as often as you like.

Set
the blending mode of
this layer to Color Dodge.

7. Add a levels adjustment layer

Now click on
the Create an Adjustment
Layer icon in
the layers palette and select Levels... and
click OK.
We now have a Levels Adjustment Layer and like in step 5 we're going to change
it
to
a Clipping
Layer and this time on top of our clouds layer by pressing Ctrl + G (Command
+
G
on
the Mac) or Ctrl + Alt + G (Command + Option + G on the Mac) if you use Photoshop CS2. By turning it into a clipping layer we're making sure that the levels
adjustment
will only affect the clouds layer.

This is how the result should look like in our layers palette:

8. Select the proper brush

Now open the Levels Adjustment Layer by
double clicking on its icon in
the layers palette.
Select the gray slider
and move it sideways, in my example I moved it slightly
to the left or right. Just experiment, it
all depends on your particular image.

Final result

And here we have the final result.
Yours will look slightly different, but like I said earlier;
experiment
with all
the settings.

In this example I used 4 colors; I started with blue,
followed by red, yellow and white.

I
had to go back to the clouds layer a few times in this
last example to get the effect that I wanted. So again
remember; if you
don't
like the final result, consider to go back to the clouds
layer and press Ctrl + F (Command
+ F on the Mac) a few times, play with the gray slider
of the
Levels adjustment or paint different shapes.

Note: Be
careful with Ctrl + F, because you have to be
sure that the last effect you used was Render/Clouds.
All Ctrl
+ F does is repeating
the
last
effect
that was used. If you hit Ctrl+F and something goes wrong, then just undo by
pressing Ctrl + Z (Command + Z on the Mac) and go back to the menu and select Filter/Render/Clouds again.
After that you can use Ctrl+F again.

And what about the Hue & Saturation adjustment layer we added earlier?
Open the Hue & Saturation Adjustment
Layerby
double clicking on its icon in
the layers palette.
Now use the Hue slider to change the colors of
the clouds or use the Saturation slider to change
the saturation.

To summarize all 5 major steps:

Create a black background

Add a new layer, painting colored shapes with soft
brush and blur the layer

Add a Hue & Saturation adjustment clipping layer

Add a new layer, filling it with black and apply the
clouds effect, layer's blending mode set to color
dodge

Add a Levels adjustment clipping layer

Animation

There are a few things in this tutorial that make it easier
to use the effect for an animation and that's because
of the following variable adjustments:

Ctrl+F (Command + F on the Mac) to re-render clouds
effect

Adjustment layer for the Hue & Saturation correction

Adjustment layer for the Levels correction

Because of this it's easy to create the frames that can
be used in a program like ImageReady.

Since levels adjustment layers are not supported in ImageReady
(what a shame!), we'll have to export every frame to a
separate file. It's a good idea to export all files (frames)
to a dedicated directory and give each file a number.
It's advised to to use numbers like 9,10,11, etc, but
please include all preceding zeros, so in my example
the numbers should be 09,10,11, etc. This avoids
that files are sorted in the wrong way.

Open ImageReady and select in the menu File/Import/Folder
as Frames... and the program will convert all your
files as frames. How you go from there is all up to you
and a detailed description of how to adjust or expand the
animation in Imageready is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
I can
tell you the results can be quite spectacular, depending
on how you created your frames in Photoshop to begin with
and how many frames you used.